


Solamen

by MumblingSage



Category: Historical RPF, Will (TV 2017)
Genre: #Let Kit Marlowe Fight God, Catharsis, Character Study, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Fluff and Angst, Grief/Mourning, Hell, Literary References & Allusions, Loyalty, M/M, Post-Canon, Religious Discussion, Tenderness, True Love, Vulnerability, also seriously soooo many literary allusions, in which Kit is neither writer's blocked nor cockblocked, meticulously researched heresy, raging at the heavens, supportive boyfriends
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-19
Updated: 2017-11-19
Packaged: 2019-02-04 05:13:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,074
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12763908
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MumblingSage/pseuds/MumblingSage
Summary: “You’re thinking. Of what?”“What rich men lack, poor men have, what’s higher than heaven or more bottomless than hell. In a word, Tommy, nothing.”Thomas sighed, not needing words to express how if that was the case, he dreaded the idea of Kit thinking something. Against either of their intentions, surely, it pulled a smile across Kit’s mouth.“Leave these frivolous demands, which strike a terror to my fainting soul,” he murmured.A deeper sigh, humor mixed with ruefulness. Thomas read the play last night—first audience, as befit a patron—and he knew better than any what it meant for Kit to quote something he’d already written down. Yet, undaunted by a failed exorcism, Thomas stroked a hand through Kit’s hair. “Then I will lie here and think of nothing with you.”





	Solamen

**Author's Note:**

> Solamen miseris socios habuisse doloris.  
> —from Doctor Faustus (Act II, Scene i). Often translated as “misery loves company,” it more literally means “it is a comfort to the wretched to have companions in pain.”

He woke from a sleep without dreams—no wolves, dead men, or demons.

If he had, he could have known the reassurance of opening his eyes onto a room empty of them. Of an instant when he could imagine, because he saw them no longer, that they were not real.

Kit stretched out his hand to the fireplace beside him. He held it so close the heat dried the sweat on his skin, then reached inward, and he watched as if it might bring words to the surface, the way it would reveal an intelligencer’s code written invisibly in orange juice on parchment. There was nothing but the imprint of removed rings and the marks circling his wrists from the belt he’d had Thomas loop around them—

“ _I confess, I am thy captive I_

_and hold my conquer’d hands for thee to tie…_

_Unwilling lovers love doth more torment_

_than such as in their bondage feel content.”—_

And even those sent no signal to his nerves now that pleasure was past. He felt the fire instead, closing his eyes. A glow played behind the lids, ruddy and distant. Dry warmth seemed to climb his arm like a glove, a vine, or as if he reached into a pool of flame. Not entirely unpleasant.

He imagined it lasting forever.

He had thought he’d written it all out, awakening empty and alone to find his last words at the end of the page: _terminat auctor opus,_ a midnight scrawl he couldn’t even remember shaping, a fever of creative furor marring his usually enviable secretary hand. So much for the Latin, now the Greek: _tetelestai._ But this was vocabulary for going into Hell, not coming back from it.

Beside him, Thomas stirred. They’d fucked on these cushions piled across the floor—no patience for a bed; not that Kit ever had any—and fallen asleep together after. An early evening, not only by their standards, once they came home from the play. The damnably good play. William the Conqueror’s _Richard III._

“What are you doing?”

“Nothing.” He dropped his hand. “Not sleeping, not writing, not making love to you—”

“You’re thinking. Of what?”

“What rich men lack, poor men have, what’s higher than heaven or more bottomless than hell. In a word, Tommy, _nothing._ ”

Thomas sighed, not needing words to express how if that was the case, he dreaded the idea of Kit thinking _something_. Against either of their intentions, surely, it pulled a smile across Kit’s mouth.

“Leave these frivolous demands, which strike a terror to my fainting soul,” he murmured.

A deeper sigh, humor mixed with ruefulness. Thomas read the play last night—first audience, as befit a patron—and he knew better than any what it meant for Kit to quote something he’d already written down. He wasn’t a player, to perform his own lines; if he spoke them, it was because writing hadn’t been enough.

Yet, undaunted by a failed exorcism, Thomas stroked a hand through Kit’s hair. When his fingers reached the scalp through the thick yellow strands, something of iron in Kit’s back began to unbend. He let his head come to rest on Thomas’s shoulder.

Thomas moved on the pillows to find a more comfortable position, his fingers never ceasing to coil and uncoil. “Then I will lie here and think of nothing with you.”

Kit closed his eyes, breathing in the sweat-washed scents of civet and jasmine, Thomas’s familiar perfume. And he continued to think of nothing.

Nothing—what he had been, what he rose from, a cobbler’s son who’d met the demands of Canterbury’s King’s School and was carried on a scholarship to Cambridge. From origins, if not base, then certainly obscure; a mind and heart like primeval muck, or apeiron, an unshaped chaos of seemingly limitless potential. What he would have remained if not for his king. A nothing bursting with potential that Barret Emerson had seen, and grasped, and shaped. As if he were a work of art as much as that portrait, which, he’d heard, was on its way to the hallowed halls of Corpus Christi with those of other prized alumni. Specifically to the dining hall. Maybe someone behind in reading his Latin had misunderstood the epigraph: _Quod me nutrit…_

Nothing—answer to the riddle, _If you eat it, you will die._

_…me destruit._

What nourished and destroyed.

How many had he nurtured, how many destroyed, with his wit from heaven and vices from hell? He that took as his scope, not mortal matters or rhyming mother-wits, but the higher, more astounding terms of eternal fame, who neither feared God nor dreaded devil nor aught admired but his wonderful self (he couldn’t now remember who had slung that dart, which landed as a compliment), who meant to be a terror to the world. And this was what it made him. A little less nothing. Fit, at least, to write passions for the souls below.

Nothing—what Barrett Emerson may have become, if not worse.

He’d lost the man who’d made him Marlowe; that was injury enough. But no more than he should have expected. All must sin and consequently die—hard but proven. He had not expected to lose him in parts, first to rejection, and the mortal sin of despair. Nor how contagious that despair had proved, how ready he’d been to be infected, to grow sick with being Christopher cocksucking Marlowe.

He nuzzled closer to Thomas. Recent memory made that epithet sting far less. Simple rejection, heart-shattering, he could heal from. It wasn’t what troubled him now. Even his grief— _a hell of grief: where is my king? Gone, gone, and do I remain alive?_ —even that was not the worst part. 

The dart-slingers were right. Kit Marlowe did not fear hell. Not for himself. It was a fine argument on which to base a play; it was a nice pilgrimage there and back, for those who could write their way into it and out again.

But no play, no wordplay, no poetry could alter the truth.

He sat up, turning from the fire. Its heat still kissed his spine. Thomas’s hand fell away. He reached for it without thinking, and was startled at how warm his lover’s fingers felt compared to his own. It was a different kind of burning.

“He died thinking both of us were damned.”

“Emerson?”

“Yes.”

The acknowledgement tasted like bile, so nauseating he pressed his free hand over his mouth, his very insides rejecting it.

“No, Kit,” Thomas murmured behind him in a softer rejection.

“I tried to tell him that.”

“How could Christ condemn us, when even he had a beloved disciple who leaned always in his bosom?”

“Of course.” He dropped his hand, smiling to hear his own interpretation returned to him—faithful to the Greek, even if it implied the relationship between the Evangelist and his divine bedfellow might be too Grecian for the censors. “My darling, doubting Thomas.” Kit brought up their joined hands and kissed his fingers.

“Not doubting. It’s a different faith.”

“In _Christ_ opher Marlowe?”

“Not only in you, even if your self-conceit is vaster than the vaulted heavens. In something more.”

It was refreshing and reassuring, after all his thoughts on nothing, to be accused of conceitedness in such an affectionate tone.

Thomas continued in a still lower voice, “In love, maybe.”

Even Kit would not mock that. He realized, somewhat jarred, and jarringly touched, that Thomas’s faith was genuine, in that sweet heresy and all the rest. Yet Kit knew from experience how easily words about God’s mercy could be shaped. Perhaps especially when they weren’t believed, only manipulated as another device in a wit’s store of rhetoric.

Belief was just a state of mind. And he knew the state of mind Barrett Emerson died in.

All Kit’s reassurances hadn’t been enough to persuade him otherwise.

 _I think hell’s a fable._ A children’s story to make them ashamed of what they were—and he remembered the kinds of stories they told to children in the King’s School, the _Catechism_ teaching obedience and awareness of their own wretchedness—a tale to keep them in terror and awe. A poisonous nothing.

 _Hell hath no limit…for where we are is hell, and where hell is, there must we ever be._ He could still hear that rattling breath in his dreams, and waking too; some corner of his mind had not yet surrendered that labored battle for his king’s life. In his plays death was a matter of two or three words, a line of direction after all the eloquent speeches— _he is murdered; he stabs him; they shoot; he dies_ —not endless days and nights of hell on earth. Every bed to him had become a death bed. He only hoped to be spared one. Better to go suddenly: a lightning strike, a thief in the night, a dagger in the eye, swift at the height of life without time to do more than cry out, if that. No kindly omnipotence would allow such a creeping, inescapable, useless suffering. Certainly, men died worse deaths every day. Kit had betrayed men to them, even innocent men; and the men he’d sold them to had brethren around the world who committed greater atrocities still, wars and famines and more massacres than he could ever write plays about, so many of them the name of God—which only made the argument more persuasive. Why not assume that the power which asked or at least allowed this was cruel and hateful and deserved to be hated? If hell occurred on earth, why not an everlasting agony below it?  

As if unsatisfied with the physical anguish, which with some mercy had ended, there was the spiritual as well, the depths of which they’d both tried to spare each other. “ _Though thou hast now offended like a man, do not persevere in it like a devil_ ,” Kit said now, as if speaking to himself. “ _Yet, yet, thou hast an amiable soul…_ Faith in love, yes. He had that too, Thomas, but also in a less sympathetic power. In the sort of stern heavenly sire who expects repentance of Its prodigal sons. Out of love, he tried to encourage me to renounce him.”

“Is the old man in your play based on him?” He could have flinched from the thickness in Thomas’s throat, the pain he took on sympathetically, a pain Kit failed to spare him. Once again came the temptation to offer more honeyed words, sweetening and smoothing the bitter, harrowing truth.

“Not so baldly.” It was never a matter of neat correlation, the parts of his life that found their way into ink. Or the parts of others’ lives. “And neither was Faustus’s ranting at the end. His selfish terror. My…my king was not so selfish. He wouldn’t even let me see if he was terrified. I’m the one who fears he was.”

Standing, he started across the room. Unsteady steps like those of a man fleeing what burned behind him. On the table, he found a jug still half full of wine, then two cups, one turned on its side and surrounded by a sticky red film. Kit righted it and filled it with as steady a hand as he could manage.

“He couldn’t convince me to see his love as a cause of damnation, and I’m afraid I could not convince him to see himself as worthy of heaven. It was no help that my own confidence in heaven is…something less than strong.”

“You’ve never been known for your orthodoxy.” He heard Thomas adjust the cushions behind him. “Which is why I was surprised to hear of your involvement with the Catholics.”

Kit took a breath, and a drink. He did owe answers for that. “Research.”

“Only that?” 

“For one of my plays? There’s no _only_ about it.” If lack of belief made him able to manipulate words of faith like poetic devices, his devotion to words and devices left him susceptible, sometimes, to conviction. He wrote to make the edge of life sharper and its cuts less stinging, and where there ceased to be a division between _writing_ and _living,_ the difference between _writing_ and _believing_ likewise vanished. To the point that, without belief, he had struggled to write—and when he couldn’t research a way to salvation, couldn’t write a repentance that worked… “I searched for heaven.”

“And found hell instead?” Thomas asked, without any note of horror, with raw gentleness instead, and Kit could have wept for gratitude; he could have kissed him, and should have, but he was far across the room.

“No,” he said warmly. “I found the earth.” _And you on it_ : the eternal wonder of poets is how some things can be said without voice.

In answer, Thomas made the startled sound with which he sometimes responded to his kisses, but softer. “Oh.”

“A sight better than hell. Or heaven either.” Kit smiled, tried to smile, sweetness for Thomas’s sake, but bitterness curdled the curl of his lip. “They’ll think my play is about the wickedness of the devil. In fact it’s about the terror of God.”

“You don’t mean that as a holy virtue.”

“Why shouldn’t we be afraid of Him? Master and creator of Lucifer, architect of Hell? And the one who decided so many of us unfortunates must fill its pits?”

Pages rustled as Thomas drew a sheaf of folded papers from where they’d let them fall amid the cushions. He paged through, finding the scene—anticipating Kit by quoting it. “ _Mountains and hills, come fall on me and hide me—_ ”

“— _from the heavy wrath of God_.,” Kit said with undeniable relish, drunk on the lushness of the syllables far more than he could ever be intoxicated by the wine he’d hardly sipped. He turned the glass in his fingers. “While Ned Alleyn says that on the stage, God will not be able to hide from my wrath, either.”

“That doesn’t sound like fear.” Neither did Thomas’s words, despite all the reason he had given him to react with dismay. He’d heard all Kit’s words about anarchy and chaos before, but those were lighthearted jests compared to this blasphemy. This was not the first play in which Kit tried to dare God out of heaven, but _Tamburlaine_ had been a fantasy of audacity and ambition. There was no sweet fruition of an earthly crown at the end of this, much less a celestial throne.

“No,” he said, turning, “I have no fear of the author of the universe. If such exists, I must have great respect for It as an ingenious poet, but I have some higher regard for truth and justice.”

Thomas could respond with surprise or sarcasm at Kit espousing virtues, and maybe he would have before what happened with Alice. That night had been its own—not a hell, not for Kit, he had perspective enough to know better. But a crucible, firing and shaping. It had seen a loss of faith, or perhaps just the loss of a chance at faith, not a wholehearted one either, as if he’d only needed confirmation that the papists were as full of short-sighted and cowardly authorities as the rest of them. Then a finding of it, all at the same time—if not in ceremonies or priests, in certain men, and women, and certain virtues, and to the smallest possible extent, in himself for having them. And the completion of his play. Not to forget that. It seemed he had been right about his Muse: she could only be unbound in chaos and anarchy. And in theomachy.

“Is it better,” Kit continued more softly, “to imagine a God who exists while so arbitrary and indifferent, or to believe the entire thing is just some filthily written tale?”

He poured another glass and returned with both across the room, stepping around items they’d left carelessly on the floor—knocked-aside cushions, discarded clothing, a washbasin of water gone cold and drying linen cloths, an oil flask, his belt. Reaching out with one hand to accept the wine he offered, Thomas set the manuscript in the other aside, carefully placing the pages on a bench behind his shoulders. Neither of them drank.

Kit turned his back on the manuscript, then bent his gaze away from the fire. He found he couldn’t keep from walking, from moving, travelling well-traveled ground, circling and stalking a quarry that didn’t exist, or which could as easily turn predator. 

“At least,” Thomas said behind him, “they can’t call this filthily written.”

“Precisely.” No honey would be added to the truth he’d seen there, on that journey to hell, not this time. “Maybe I’m making my own attempt at conversion, an inverted mystery play.” Not that those were permitted anymore, but the medieval papists had gotten something right with their pageantry, their use of the stage for persuasion. “Or to do to God what Master Shakespeare has just done to Topcliffe, exposing excesses and abuses. Let them ask, at the final scene, why shouldn’t Faustus live in hell a hundred thousand years and at last be saved?”

“Did Southwell manage to convince you of Purgatory?”

“Of course not. It has no scriptural basis,” he answered in the same tone—an injection of welcome lightheartedness, or at least freedom from wholehearted sincerity. “But it seems like a more just idea than being plagued in hell eternally for the crime of asking about the stars and wishing to meet Alexander and Helen in the flesh. I want them,” Kit said, “to see how a man dies in desperation. To see what it means to let someone believe he is destined for hell. And if the sight does not blot out all their piety and respect and platitudes, if it does not horrify them and replace complacent faith with contempt, with _wrath,_ and that wrath does not blot out all fear, at least it will be fear of a very different order.” 

In his pacing, he turned back again. Thomas watched him approach, listened, next to the manuscript which had only exhausted what it was possible for him to say in others’ voices, on the stage. Here, between them, he found words enough of his own.

“I wrote my way into hell and I tried to write my way back. But it isn’t just for my own sake; I mean it for them too. For my audience. For anyone in it who might have the same doubts. To let them see the horror clearly the better to reject it, to feel this dreadful fear and be driven to cast it out.”

The goblet shivered in his hand; wine spilled across the skin, dripping down his arm like fresh-drawn blood. Kit just barely caught himself before his fingers contracted and shattered the glass.

“They might see Faustus as a saint.” The idea, half-papist and blasphemous and neither as much as it was both, seemed as dazzling as the fire’s reflection in the red droplets falling from his wrist. “His saintliness showing itself as a desire for the truth. And if he is to achieve this sainthood, he must rebel against the Creator of the world, because the laws of this world, the laws it claims, at least, are traps that contradict morality or truth. Everything we do—however bad or good—we are damned. No saint could accept this God who ambushes men and women. His laws must be lies. It’s as if He…” Another layer of disgust welled up, and this time his tongue greeted its bile with relish, pure release. “He _spies_ on the dishonor in our souls, the better to damn us. And so, to be worthy of sainthood, one must be against God. Faustus becomes the moral victor, even if he has paid the price for his victory in eternal martyrdom. In a Passion that reveals the failure of the promise of salvation.”

His breath came hard, as if the air was too burning cold for his lungs. A drumming filled his chest that felt more like a fist than a heart; he waited a few moments, a little curious to see if it would burst through. It seemed as if something should strike him down now. With some surprise he realized he would rather it didn’t, much as he dreaded the words he knew he would say next.

It was hard to tell in the dance of hearth light and shadows, but he thought Thomas had gone pale, blood draining at last as the scale dawned of Kit’s blasphemy, his wrath, his despair.

“Yet I hardly care a whit about any of them,” he finished. “Not my fictive doctor, not their lordships in the high boxes, not the groundlings with their pennies, and their souls or lack thereof. There is one whose terror of God I would do anything to undo, and I cannot.”

He made it to the table, where he put the glass down before reducing it to shards or spilling the rest of the wine. He raised the back of his hand to his lips and licked away the last drops clinging there, like vinegar to quench a final thirst. Tasting salt with them, belatedly he realized it flowed down his cheeks.

There were tears in Thomas’s eyes, too; not the first time Kit had put them there, but still hard to see.

“I understand,” he said, “why love to you is about being hurt. When it seems it must end this way.”

“Some find better ends than others.” Even now, he wanted to share that hope—that for some it could turn out differently; some, through no fault or virtue of their own, could be lucky. For a time. “I must simply grapple with the consequences of my own belief. My disbelief. And the things it does not let me escape.”

Compared to his wrath against God, this was a colder thing, and dizzying, like he stood poised on the precipice above an infinite fall. If only, perhaps, it could be infinite. Without that infinity, he had more nothing that he knew how to bear. He had an eternity of never hearing that beloved voice call him “Wasp” again. And not being able to say “my King” back. Though that was true whether the voice had fallen silent and unhearing in oblivion or hell.

“Unbelief has its consolations,” he said. “It offers a world with so much less malice, and at a very good rate of exchange. Things that are not at all, are never lost.”

All the same, as smoothly as his tongue let the words roll off, his hands and heart still trembled. What he spoke of was a hanging offense—and while that wasn’t new, now he was not inviting Thomas to share in his savaging of a filthy interpretation of cruel religion neither of them believed in. He exposed his own lack of belief, his inability to be comforted or offer comfort, the untethering of what virtues he had—if their expression depended on the whim of Kit Marlowe, unpersuaded by eternal punishment or reward, not just in dart-slinger’s gossip but in truth, what could be relied on?

“Then you must consider me another of your fictions,” Thomas said, “because you are never going to lose me.”

“You can’t promise that.”

“No. But I live far less recklessly than you.”

That was a hit palpable enough that Kit took up the wineglass from the table, raising it and his eyebrows in acknowledgment.

“And if you lose me, then, it will have to be through misadventure, because I have no intention of casting you aside. Not for your own good or for mine or for the sakes of both our souls.”

Wine burning in his throat, he crossed the room to Thomas, not quite staggering—according to the evidence of his eyes, which showed his feet moving in quick and even strides—and went to his knees beside him. He took his face in his hands and drew him into a kiss.

“I shouldn’t have accused you of ever becoming sanctimonious…or saved.”

“But is that part of why you pushed me away?”

“For fear of damnation being contagious—from Emerson, to me, to you? Do you truly think I would believe that?” Casting back now, he couldn’t be certain what he believed in that time any more than he could believe how he had lived through it. All it left behind was words on pages and memories that flashed without substance, like shards of nothing.

Except some of those shards had lodged into Thomas, at which Kit wasn’t wholly surprised but for which he could not excuse himself.

“I didn’t know what to think. Especially when you seemed to turn Catholic.”

Kit startled at that, which provoked laughter—after a moment, even from him.

“I hope at least, wherever your research leads you next, and especially if it leads you back to belief, that you will allow me to be free to damn myself.”

It was the same favor he’d have had of Barrett, so Kit couldn’t refuse him. “If you’d like to join the rest of us. Keep in mind, to reach the depths that I’ve achieved you must master papism, blasphemy, heresy, atheism _and_ sodomy.”

“One’s a fair start, isn’t it?” Thomas smiled. “Maybe heresy as well—because I was also going to ask for the freedom to decide whether or not I believe I’m damned. You’re not the only one to wrestle with metaphysics, Kit.”

“No.” Faith, even if he didn’t share it, still held a sort of attraction. At least at times, and in others. Like now, when he glimpsed suddenly a God that cared for love more than laws. He wasn’t certain how that belief could hold in the face of the world’s banquet of suffering—but if it was strong enough, perhaps it could accept that God was cruel at times in order to be kind everlastingly.

“You’re right. I’m the last person who should tell you what to believe, what to risk. You’re entitled to that.” He kissed Thomas again, fingers tangling in hair, breath going short. “Thank you.”

Between kisses—“You’re a fool, Kit.”

“What? Not that I deny it…”

“Damnation aside”—as if it was a little thing; as it suddenly had become, between them, now—“did you really think marriage would make such a difference, if I entered into one?”

A hand tracking down his back nearly distracted him from answering. “What…what alternative could I expect?”

“We have an understanding.” Soft. Uncertain, or if not that, strained. For all his promises, Thomas was not the only one in the pair of them who could, or would, or had hurt the other. Kit, of course, had never promised otherwise.

Neither had either of them ever promised that it would only be a _pair_ of them. Theirs was not a bond that required faithfulness, or maybe it would be more precise to say that they didn’t believe loyalty required exclusivity. Nor would turning to others, for whatever reason, break that essential bond: put that way, it could have seemed obvious.

“Are you going to extend that understanding to the future Goodwife Walsingham?” he asked, because he wasn’t quite ready to accept a moment of unbroken pleasantness, because after showering his wrath on God he could not resist a little further lèse-majesté, because he had already thanked Thomas once tonight and had no idea how to do it further. “Will you raise a cuckoo in the nest?”

“It only seems fair,” he replied, sounding unruffled—by the question, at least. The grip of his hands grew a little harder, hungrier as Kit straddled him. “It’s unlikely to be the ruin of my dignity, considering all the company _you’ve_ enjoyed in your bed.”

“It wasn’t in a bed,” he observed, purely for the joy of being contrary; he couldn’t, alas, claim it had necessary for his inspiration, since graveyards and celibate clerics appeared to have answered that call better. Kit’s dignity did not currently have the wherewithal to accommodate that level of chagrin, so he let thought fall silent—“And neither are we now.”

The kisses deepened, sharpened, turned to biting, playful nips and the dragging of teeth along the bend of a neck, over muscles in a shoulder as they melted with rapture, across a shelf of collarbone beneath which the heart reverberated. Civet and salt, firelight and warm skin—who needed more than this? How could it not be worth everything?

“Anyway”—Thomas’s lips formed the words against his cheek, his breath a flickering caress far more gentle than his fingers—“it could take years to find a woman who could fit in such an arrangement—”

“Does this _need_ to be discussed _at present_?”

“—assuming I ever do.” He turned his face to evade a quieting kiss and caught Kit by a light hold in his hair. “I’m simply trying to impress on you that earthly matters are as unlikely as spiritual ones to separate us.”

“Well.” He smiled. “I had hoped not to escape you. I’ve already made myself your captive once tonight.”

“It’s a favor I won’t soon forget. But the surrender is mutual.” 

He nodded, Thomas’s grip slackening to let him. “It was…not difficult to believe, but to trust. Now you’ve seen why.”

“You’ve seen my answer to that.”

“I can feel it, too,” Kit said, rocking against him until he moaned. But even on the edge of physical abandonment, he knew it was more. “Thomas, I think you see more in me than I can find in myself.”

Face cradled in Kit’s hands, he smiled. “I’ve only been won with thy words and conquered with thy looks.”

Whatever the feeling with which Kit quoted his own work, and the usually mixed reception he gave the fawning of others, he wasn’t bothered by this, only overtaken by a rush of certain memories about the night a young nobleman and intelligencer had attended a showing of _Tamburlaine_ and, enraptured, not stopped to rest until he’d made the thorough acquaintance of its author.

“Who would not requite such love?” he murmured—liking the ring of his own words, yes, and wondering how they might fit on paper or the stage, but offering them too—and then answered Thomas’s allusion with a continuation, “ _To be partaker of thy good or ill_ —”

“ _Take here my hand, which is as much as if I swore by heaven_ —”

“And called the gods to witness of my vow?” Even now, a part of Kit thrilled at the thought of calling on gods, a part that would command spirits, if only poetically.

Sinking into a rite any god worth worshipping would be glad to receive, he reached for the oil flask and followed Thomas down onto the cushions.

Between touches, before cries, words—

_Thus shall my heart be combined with thine_

_Until our bodies turn to elements,_

_And both our souls aspire celestial thrones._

_***_

The image lingered behind his lids, shadowed with the lassitude that followed afterward. Joined by words. _In what resplendent honor thou hadst set in yonder throne, like those bright shining Saints, and triumphed over hell…_

He started to get up.

_O thou hast lost celestial happiness, pleasures unspeakable—_

He knew that for a lie, at least; some unspeakable pleasures lived yet on the earth.

_—bliss without end… That thou has lost, and now, poor soul, must thy good angel leave thee—_

Not so. His arm circled Kit even now.

_The jaws of hell are open to receive thee._

The embers on the hearth were dying down, pink and golden eyes winking from soft ash. He glanced at them and then away.

Thomas’s eyes gleamed, reflecting them, and following Kit’s look.

He said, “You don’t need to dive into hell to save him.”

“Of course I can’t.” He couldn’t if he wanted to. There was more to the statement than that, though; almost an order, or a plea. “I remain a creature of this earth, and on this earth I remain.” For some time yet, they might hope.

Kit had no hope beyond that. He looked into the shadows one more time, facing what no poetry could change. He could respect others’ faith but not share it; to him, like his fictive Faustus, Goodman Satan and Master Beelzebub and all three members of the Trinity remained scarecrows. Yet, like his Scythian shepherd and Dido and Homer’s Helen herself, lacking reality did not mean they lacked power. He of all people should know that, who lived and felt and thought through figures of words as much as flesh.

“Do you think I would do it, though?” he asked. “Storm wrathfully down to Gehenna and spring it open in my own harrowing of hell?”

“Yes,” Thomas said. “I can easily see you out-Christing Christ, Kit.” He sat up beside him; from the corner of his eye, Kit could also see him staring into nothing. “And now I add blasphemy to my sins. Am I approaching your level?”

He laughed. Despite it all, he could laugh. If he had no hope of seeing the face of God, he feared no hell he could not escape, and wouldn’t truly aspire to heaven anyway. The emptiness he had fled from, the draining of all significance, had failed to happen after all. A poet, he should have known better than to think meaning could not be created no matter what. The other, waiting emptiness, a restful oblivion, might have its pangs and yet its comforts too. It might be something one could wish for, to be a creature wanting soul… _All beasts are happy, for when they die, their souls are soon dissolved in elements._ The elements of this earth, with its corners he could prove so fond of.

“The Catholics might have something in Purgatory, though,” he murmured. “It permits them their prayers for the dead.” Some way to continue helping, or at least try to.

Thomas rested his head against Kit’s shoulder, and Kit leaned against him in turn. “He isn’t suffering now. We both believe that.”

“Yes.”

“And even you can’t know what his last thoughts were.”

A deathbed conversion—particularly to what must be heresy—seemed a frail hope to cling to, but it remained a possibility. Barrett may have died with more hope or more comfort than Kit feared.

“You know for certain how he lived…”

“Yet it’s something of a burden, to be all a man expects to know of heaven.” He still felt the weight from when Barrett had told him so, a heaviness that sank in his soul. It was the reason he held back from telling Thomas the same—even in gratitude, even to attempt expressing the strange but true contentment that came with expecting joy with him on earth and an afterlife in his memory.

“The burden should have been on him, to seek it out as much as possible.”

He gave himself over again to Thomas’s arms. Where he was held with the fierce care that befit how a man should handle his hope of salvation. Not to be cast out, renounced, or regretted.

For another space of time, there were no words. Words could not and…need not fix this.

Some pieces of the world were shattered beyond repair, and every day more of them, but there remained parts of reckoning and worth to be found. Or made.

“There’s something I want to write for you,” he said as he stretched out beside Thomas.

“A particular something?”

Kit couldn’t blame him for sounding incredulous, or at least startled. But to whosoever hath, shall be given—and he’d suddenly had a glimpse of another idea.

“Not another play.” Not yet. He still had the staging of _Faustus_ to get to. The thought of that was nearly enough to make him burn his books—

But it was still good for something, the writing, for himself and his audience both. To make life less cruel and more beautiful, to create something better than belief, to bring about a world more like heaven.

“Unless you want one,” he continued. “A play, a poem, new words to that song that’s swirled around the taverns since both of us were born, a swiving sonnet—”

“Is that an innovation to the form?”

He snorted. “Anything would be an improvement. It’s a form for any man who has nothing to say to do so at more length than he’d be otherwise pardoned for. But if you asked for one, you would get it. Any issue of my brain that chances to come abroad, from the first breath it takes it should be to your liking.”

“All right.” Thomas might have sounded nonplussed. Admittedly, Kit was more effusive than ordinary, which was one reason he hoped his lover might agree to receive something written down instead—it was so much easier to put these things in ink, in other voices than his own. “It’ll be to my liking, Kit, everything you do is.” He leaned closer. “Everything you _are_ is.”

 _And you the fond foster father of all the thriving children of my brain_ —just as well he didn’t say it, in light of his earlier comments about cuckoos; just as well the words were kissed deeply out of his mouth. Just as well he let this be for once.

“There’s that epyllion I’d found myself stuck on,” he said, chasing down that glimmer of inspiration. “About those lovers on either side of the Hellespont.”

“Are you going to finally write their doom for me?”

“I should, shouldn’t I? Without the doom their love is incomplete. Some things are lacking.” He gestured as if to grasp them from the air. “But I may be past the time in which no such discourse is pleasant in my ears but that where every period ends with death, and every line begins with death again.”

“For an hour at most,” Thomas said fondly.

“Then I should fetch my pen at once.”

“What if, instead,” he said, fingers gliding from Kit’s neck and down his spine, “you told me what you’d write if you did?”

“Well…” He settled against him again. “I thought I might add a happier interval to what I’ve already written.” He’d spiced the existing lines with enough references to foreboding and inevitable doom; no reader would forget Leander and his Hero were doomed, even if Kit’s pen slipped into a little delight instead. “Maybe something about love.”

“Between a man and a maiden?”

“That I’ve already written, with complete poetic license.” The only female lover Kit had ever received was the Muse, and by how she treated him, he was not inclined to entertain a subsequent attempt. “Yet my rude pen can hardly blazon forth the loves of men…much less of powerful gods.”

“And so,” Thomas said, in mild contrast to his dripping irony, “between a youth and a god.”

“Precisely.” And this time, the backdrop would not be eternal fire but water. “ _He heaved him up and, looking on his face, beat down the bold waves with his triple mace…”_

Thomas chuckled, but listened patiently as Kit tried to continue the lines.

“ _Leander, being up, began to swim—and looking back, saw Neptune follow him._ ”

“This isn’t in Musaeus.”

“No, but it will be in Marlowe. _And up again…and close beside him swim…and talk of love._ ”

Thomas caught his gesturing hand and carried it to his lips. As his kisses traveled down the wrist, Kit remembered the marks, now faded, from their earlier game. A little too wicked to inject into the poem; but then he considered a way to allude to them—a gift, something beautiful, love’s adornment.

“ _The god put—”_ Two syllables needed, but of course, it was the name of the straight—“ _Helle’s bracelet on his arm…_ ” a simple matter of rhyme, then: “ _And swore the sea should never do him harm._ ”

“That’s wonderful,” Thomas said—catching the reference? Perhaps; a certain gleam appeared in his eyes that owed little to the cooling embers. “But isn’t he supposed to drown at the end? Will the protection of Poseidon to put a snarl in his fate?”

“Who knows? I haven’t finished the poem yet. And if I’m disregarding Musaeus this far, why not farther? If I’m forgetting death…” Not quite that, not ever. But if something was forgotten, it became difficult to defy. “This wretched world,” he said, “is almost six thousand years old, or else a great deal older if those Algonquians that Hariot interviewed are correct in their legends and men lived long before Adam. And in all that time, has any man truly died, in his own person, for a cause of love? Leander may live many a fair year if Hero remains a nun. Or else he’ll wash himself in the Hellespont, be taken with the cramp, and drown, Hero of Sestos notwithstanding.” He laughed. “But they’re all lies. Men have died, from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love.”

Thomas might not go so far as to agree, but he laughed along with him.

Then he added, soft and certain, “Any more than they have been damned for it.”

“Love has its hurts,” Kit agreed, “but never so much.”

“Speaking of endings…”

“I thought we deliberately were not.”

“I have to, just for a moment. If my brother dies…”

 _If_ in this case meant _when,_ but Kit only nodded.

“The estate falls to me. Should that happen, I plan to leave my work with the intelligencers.”

“It’s early days yet, but I can thoroughly commend the choice.”

“My family has a place in Kent called Scadbury. It’s beautiful…quiet…private. You might join me there.”

“I might. Even if it is quiet.”

“It could be a good place for writing. You might finish your poem there.”

He smiled. “Once I decide how to end it.”

“Or extend it into eternity with endless original episodes about the love of gods. Who am I to argue?”

“Who indeed.” Kit gave him one more kiss…and another…setting aside all thoughts Leander and his fate in all its unhappy or happy particulars. What mattered more, he thought, was how you could extend and expend your lines before any conclusion.

Yet there was wisdom, too, in knowing where to end.

And so.

~~~

**Author's Note:**

> As a not-straight ex-Catholic who also happens to be grieving, I had FEELINGS about Kit Marlowe's character arc. Then I decided to write about the FEELINGS. Then I conducted research in order to better write about the FEELINGS and...I don't know if the research made me write better, but it made me feel more and it also provided many, many, many quotes and allusions that I've sprinkled throughout the dialogue and narrative. 
> 
> In brief, if something seems exceptionally eloquent, it's probably not me. 
> 
> Works of Marlowe quoted or referenced include: his translation of Ovid's Elegia II (the bondage one ;D), Dr Faustus of course, Tamburlaine parts I and II, Hero & Leander, and the Jew of Malta (when Kit says "You see more in me than I can find in myself" he's quoting a character who later butchers his love poetry so badly that he vows "by Dis [Hades] above." Still a sweet sentiment. I'm a big believer in cynicism + love coexisting). 
> 
> Also a line is unabashedly pirated from "As You Like It," because Shakespeare referenced Marlowe first. Well, actually later, in 1599, about 10 years after the time this fic is supposed to take place in. Speaking of time-travelling allusions, many of the descriptions Marlowe gives himself ("wits from heaven and vices from hell," etc.) are taken from what people have said about him since his death, whether by months, years, or centuries. And in fact, the line about owing "some respect for an ingenious poet, but I have some higher regard for truth and justice" was said by antiquary Thomas Ritson about Marlowe himself, as quoted by David Riggs in an essay, "Marlowe's Quarrel with God," that completely stole my title for this. Anyway, I like to think Marlowe would approve of how the tables turned. Incidentally, the lines which made me cry most to write are the ones paraphrasing the dedication of "Hero and Leander," which was written to Thomas Walsingham by the printer soon after Marlowe's death. You can read it in full here: https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/m/marlowe/christopher/hero-and-leander/dedication.html
> 
> The "As You Like It" quote had an added embellishment to share my favorite "atheist" argument to rock Elizabethan England: the discovery that Native Americans had a historical record that proved the existence of human beings before the supposed creation of the earth in 4004 BC, apparently known as the "pre-Adamitic heresy." In his book The Reckoning, Charles Nicholls argues that this was a) a belief Marlowe espoused and b) in fact what Shakespeare was referring to when he mentioned the earth being six thousand years old in the context of that "As You Like It" quote right next to a reference to Hero and Leander (Billy Shakes wasn't brave enough to risk saying it himself, but apparently the implication would be obvious to contemporaries). Even when you think history's interesting, it's always more interesting than you realized. 
> 
> My last note on interesting history, allusions, and chronology: the comparison of Faustus to a saint who must defy God for the sake of truth was made in the 1970s by Polish director Jerzy Grotowski in his staging of Dr Faustus and meshed with my own interpretation of the play (for the purposes of this story at least) too well not to quote from substantially.


End file.
